“Does financial stress affect my well-being at work? Honestly, I don’t even have time to think about that. I just do my job, get through the day, and then head off to my side gig to make extra cash. No time to stress about stress when I’m juggling two jobs.”
That’s a 36-year-old customer service advocate, from one of the interviews that opens a new book chapter I’ve written with Belgin Okay-Somerville and Eva Selenko. It’s a fitting place to start. It captures something the academic literature has mostly missed: the people most affected by financial stress are often the least visible in research about it. They don’t have time to fill out a survey about their well-being. They’re too busy holding down the second job that’s supposed to fix the problem.
Our chapter, “The Road to Dignity,” appears in the new Occupational Health in a New World of Work handbook. It tries to do two things: pull together what we actually know about why financial stress gets under people’s skin psychologically, and make the case that fixing it isn’t just good management. It’s a matter of basic workplace dignity.
Stress and deprivation aren’t the same thing
The first distinction worth getting right is easy to blur. Financial stress is not the same as financial deprivation. Deprivation is the objective stuff: income, debt, savings, whether you have unemployment protection if things go wrong. Financial stress is the subjective experience layered on top of it, the worry and the sense that your resources won’t stretch far enough.
The two don’t move in lockstep. Two people can have nearly identical bank balances and report very different levels of stress, depending on what they’re comparing themselves to, what support they can lean on, or simply how threatening the situation feels to them. Two people with very different bank balances can report the same level of stress, for entirely different reasons. Organizations that only look at the objective side, telling themselves “our people are paid fairly, so we’re fine,” are missing half the picture.
Why money trouble gets under your skin
The chapter walks through several psychological mechanisms that explain why financial stress does so much damage to well-being. A few are worth pulling out here.
One is simple resource depletion. Money functions as a kind of master resource that buys access to other things people need, like housing, health care, and time. When it’s threatened, people pour more time and energy into defending it, which leaves less for everything else, including recovery and sleep. It’s a downward spiral that’s easy to underestimate from the outside.
Another is what scarcity researchers call cognitive narrowing. When resources feel insufficient, attention gets pulled toward the immediate problem, the overdue bill or the looming expense, and away from almost everything else. This isn’t a character flaw or a failure of discipline. It’s what limited cognitive bandwidth does to anyone under pressure, and it’s driven by the perception of scarcity, not only the reality of it.
A third mechanism, and one I find genuinely underappreciated, is identity threat. Financial hardship can quietly exclude people from the ordinary social fabric of life: the coffee catch-up, the round of drinks, the ability to reciprocate a gift. Losing access to those small rituals chips away at a sense of belonging. At work specifically, it can undermine someone’s ability to feel like a credible provider, professional, or team member. That’s core to how people experience worth at work, not a minor side effect.
Precarious work turns up the volume
None of this happens in a vacuum. The chapter also looks at how the rise of precarious work, gig platforms, algorithmically managed shifts, short-term contracts, doesn’t just create more financial stress. It amplifies its psychological cost. Someone with a stable income and a financial buffer can appraise a stressor as manageable. Someone without those buffers is more likely to appraise the same stressor as threatening and uncontrollable, and that appraisal, not just the raw numbers, is what drives the toll on well-being. Precarity removes the shock absorbers.
A dignity problem, not only a cost problem
The chapter takes a position worth stating plainly. The usual business case for addressing financial stress, better retention, less absenteeism, healthier productivity numbers, is true but insufficient on its own. Financial well-being matters because it’s a precondition for people to participate fully and autonomously in their own lives, not merely because it improves output.
When employees are financially stressed, they’re less able to assert their preferences, push back on unfair treatment, or take the professional risks that meaningful development often requires. Economic vulnerability quietly shifts bargaining power. That’s a dignity issue as much as a psychological or financial one, and it belongs in the same conversation as fairness and inclusion rather than filed separately under “compensation policy.”
What organizations can actually do
The chapter isn’t only diagnosis. It lays out a few evidence-informed levers, with honest caveats about each.
Fair, livable pay that keeps pace with the cost of living is the most direct mechanism available. Flexible payroll, giving employees access to earned wages before payday, can help smooth short-term shocks, but only if it’s paired with genuine financial planning support. Otherwise it risks simply relocating next month’s shortfall.
Traditional and in-kind benefits, retirement matching, insurance, subsidized childcare or transport, build a longer-term sense of security. The evidence here comes with a real caution though: for the lowest-income workers, these benefits can sometimes fail to reduce financial stress as intended, because the underlying problem is often too few paid hours rather than too few benefits. A well-designed benefits package can’t substitute for adequate hours or adequate pay.
Financial education paired with personal coaching shows real promise, particularly because it builds a sense of control and reduces the mental load of financial rumination. It has limits too, and needs to be designed around the actual financial realities of workers living close to the edge, rather than assuming everyone’s problem is a lack of financial literacy.
The research gap nobody’s fixed yet
The part of the chapter I’d point colleagues to specifically is the methods section. We argue that financial stress research has a self-reinforcing blind spot. The workers most affected by it are the hardest to reach through conventional research: they lack the time, the technology access, or the willingness to disclose sensitive financial information to a stranger with a survey link. So the literature ends up built largely on the experiences of relatively financially stable people, which is exactly backwards. We make the case for community-based recruitment through food banks, unions, and trusted intermediaries, more qualitative and participatory methods, and multilevel designs that connect individual experience to organizational policy. This isn’t a methodological nicety. It’s the only way to actually see the population the chapter is about.
Where this fits
This chapter sits close to the center of what I keep coming back to in my own work: what makes careers sustainable, and for whom. Financial stress is one of the clearest cases where an individual-level psychological experience is really a structural condition wearing a personal face. “Just build resilience” is the wrong answer when the organization itself is the source of the instability.
Schreurs, B., Okay-Somerville, B., & Selenko, E. (2026). The road to dignity: Addressing financial stress and its effects on workers. In C. Vanroelen, L. Seubert, & T. Bodin (Eds.), Occupational Health in a New World of Work (Handbook Series in Occupational Health Sciences). Springer Nature Switzerland AG. https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-3-031-88856-4